The only thing I would add is that it is good to keep the Word docs short. I.e. each Word file is single asset that may or may not be combined with other assets. It actually helps re-usability if they can stand on their own. But they should be limited to the minimum that can do so. I have found that authors will instigate such an approach themselves independently of any CMS.
Thus, the internal structure of each individual file is simply less important. When using metadata to combine files (as opposed to structured XML), you gain a great deal of flexibility. You can dynamically associate content based on tag values. And, you have made it easier, not harder on authors.
Loose coupling is better all around. For example, you can often fully automate the Word-to-XHTML conversion and leave it at that. If revisions are needed, just update the Word document.
take it easy,
Charles Reitzel
At 05:07 PM 11/19/2002 +0000, Eoin Campbell wrote:
You don't need to cripple Word to force authors to
use styles well. You can provide a template which supports the authoring process by providing menus, toolbars and shortcut keys that make it easier for authors to create well- than badly styled content.
A simple example is to map the <Ctrl>+1 key combination to the 'Heading 1' style. Authors are quite happy to use features that make life easier for them.
You can also simply ignore presentation formatting (font family, size, color, etc.) when converting to XML, and only map named styles to XML elements.
We have got generally excellent results when combining these two principles, and turning Word into a reasonable tool for creating structured XML content. Depending on the application, an editor may need to use a real XML editor to further enrich content originally created in Word, but that is a lot better than forcing all authors to create content directly in XML.
Structured Word documents convert very well into XML, using any of the available Word to XML converters.
The articles on the www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int website are created in Word by about 25 authors all over Europe, and submitted by email. The Word documents are converted to XML by an editorial team, further edited, and finally published as HTML online.
At 16:52 18/11/2002, "Austin, Darrel" wrote:
So, I was thinking...I know you can tap in to Word's engine and customize the UI it with dlls and such. What would be nice is an add-on that would 'cripple' word to the point where the author could only style text based on the style sheets defined by an external author (via a template, perhaps). No font picking, changing colors, bolding/underlining random text, etc. That
would seem to me an ideal way to get content authors to start creating more structured content without having to be wrestled out of their safe haven of MS Word. It would also make a word to clean XML parser a lot easier to
create.
-- Eoin Campbell, Technical Director, XML Workshop Ltd,
-- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
